Correct. Even a disease can do them in, so they still need a lot of luck to actually live for thousands of years. Nudge, OTOH, was both immortal and regenerative. Better if you really want to live forever, but giving you no exit should you become bored with it all. Though I wonder what lots of dynamite would do. Would the vaporized bits come back together? Better yet a thermonuclear blast to really vaporize you as well as dry up the vapor.

You could be right, sort of. How hard would it be to hit a rapidly moving target like her leg, and directly in the kneecap? With a crossbow no less. The wavy line trailing the thing puts me in mind of a guided missle zeroing in on it’s target. So the guy thinks “right knee” pulls the trigger, and off goes the magic arrow.

It’d be kind of hard to fire a a full sized crossbow (as this appears to have been) one handed with any degree of accuracy. It may be a guard was firing wildly in a panic and just accidentally hit the knee. It’d be a fluke; but history is rife with flukes.

I cannot even begin to comprehend the girls suffering at that point. not to help someone who their tormentors were scared of. they must have been frozen in fear thinking it was somesort of trap or something.

and the fact they all ‘survived’ this…
sure they were turned into an unstoppable monster and had to be seperated as their pain made them want to blow the world up but when they had the choice to think beyond the pain..they chose to be good.

this storyline is bringing out way more respect for the golem girls from me (even if i haven’t a clue why its being told now)

I’m hoping for more history on Brandi. We know a lot about Jin, and a fair bit about Bud.
Brandi, who I thought was the fighter of the bunch, is more and more being shown in a different light.
I think my opinion actually comes from the wallpaper of Warrrior Brandi more so than the story line.

According to Maya, Lanthas was a matriarchy at one point:http://wapsisquare.com/comic/messed-up/
It could be there were many female warriors prior to the “religious uprising that flipped the world over.” Brandi may have been a last vestige of that era and was chosen for this because of her warrior abilities and fighting mentality. That would explain the guilt see feels now about not rising to Jin’s defense. Now … why was Bud chosen?

I seem to recall that they were hamstrung when they were tossed in the pit. That, as much as kneecapping, would tend to … discourage … much movement.

Also “warrior” or not, she’s seventeen or so, she’s been systematically brutalised and tortured, specifically to break her will. This has happened so fast that she still hasn’t had time to really get moving.

“And still I did nothing… I let the angel fall,” is an after-action report from a less-than-impartial observer.

People will beat themselves up for not preventing things n one could prevent, or for not saving people no-one could have saved.

The cop trying to talk the would-be suicide off the ledge, for instance. who blames himself for not doing more when the guy actually jumps.

“Survivor Guilt” is a very powerful emotion.
That seems to be in play here too. “I should have been able to do something” is what many survivors and witnesses of brutality keep slamming themselves with. It often takes years of therapy to re-align their emotions and self-hatred.

In Brandi’s case, this self-hatred could have led to her “motherly” ways. Something to redeem herself.

When at their private island, Brandi already clearly stated that she freezes when faced with unforeseen situations.(not good for a warrior) Situations like this.

It almost certainly led to her using her intellect in devising a way to “fix” the calendar-machine that was at the heart of all suffering.

I once listened to the account of a Vietnamese man recalling a napalm bombing carried out against his village. He was one of seven survivors.

He had seen the jet coming at him. There had been several flyovers by helicopters just before, bullets raining down everwhere, people running for cover, and he’s crouched down beside a low wall, panicked. It gets quiet, he stands up, he hears the distant roar of the jet engines screaming at him. He turns and watches the distant metal dart high in the sky hurtle toward him, watches the bombs drop, and standing there time slows to a stop.

They burst in the air. No flash, no blinding light. Just a blanket of fire hundreds of feet wide, falling like water poured from a bucket. It catches and twirls in the wind, ripples and forms a few small pockets of empty space. One of these lands on him. The fire lands on everything else. There is no air, no sound. People are swallowed whole. The heat is blistering. In that moment there is just flame rolling gently over the ground like fog. Then the shockwave of expanding atmosphere, the bloodwails of the dying, the blackness of smoke, the stench of naphtha, and the crackling and popping of rapid incineration.

He stood there for a moment, then threw himself through the fire. Somehow he got clear. He leapt into a rice paddie to try to smother the flames consuming his clothing and his hair, rolled in mud to soak the oils off of his scorching skin. And then simply ran, leaving his family and the rest of the village to burn alive.

Somewhere in this world, I am convinced the hatred and suffering of humanity is building to monstrous heights. Golems or no, it will awaken someday. Arguably, it already has.

Angels and demons – they’re projections of our binary nature, stripped of complicating vestiges. We can do the most enlightened, generous acts – charity can abound, gentleness and care spread like ripples on a pond. And then we can turn around and bomb and maim and burn and murder. We are more than the sum of our parts; we can do good and even in that, there will be the hint of rot on the edge of detection. We worship the gods we deserve – what kinds of gods are playing with our world today, as they played with the world of Lanthas?

Atrocities have been going on a long, long time; they are nothing new. Crammed into one of my overstuffed bookshelves is an awful book Century of Genocide which documents a small piece of man’s inhumanity to man. As bad as it seems, I am convinced for every Adolf Hitler there exists a Paul Rusesabagina. For every deranged lunatic willing to kill for some ’cause’ there is a human who jumps into freezing water to rescue complete strangers at the cost of their own life. For every Grendel there is a Beowulf. Yin and Yang. Light and Dark. Positive and Negative. There is Balance.
I am enjoying this chapter because we are getting a glimpse of Brandi’s POV, Yea!!

Hu… when did she take a bath?
In the last panel yesterday she was soaked with blood and … uhm … playing with internal parts of an unlucky guard.
And now she’s fresh as a daisy? (did she poit the blood away?)
BTW: ouchie

Yep, that thought often occurs to me as well. Helps to put things in perspective too. When you think things are bad for you, just remember, your home and entire family weren’t just washed out to sea by a tsunami.

Nonetheless, it’s awful to think of the massive sufferring that goes on now and gone on in the past. Especially to children. I think seeing someone torturing and/or mutilating and murdering a child is the one thing which would send me into an instant homicidal rage.

You and me both…and when you think about it, by today’s standards, Brandi & Bud were still children…just on the cusp of becoming adults…when this was done to them. I think I might have joined in the evisceration party with Jin…

Well, by today’s “standards” people still roam around in their 20’s partying and acting like children in adult bodies. Fact is, in older times it was understood that late teen (and some mid teen) you had the mental ability to deal with adult situations. Not that the ‘kids’ today lack the capacity, it’s simply not expected of them so they fail to oblige. By 18-20 people used to be married with usually at least one child or one on the way. That takes responsibility to accomplish successfully.

For the time, however, they were bordering on old maids when you didn’t usually live past 40. You had to start at 12 or 13. Which is why so many adulthood rituals started about that age. For my part, I’m talking about little children. Cute little ones who can’t even understand why anyone would hurt them so. Some monster putting out cigaretts on them or stick their little hand in boiling water or drownding them in the bath. Even when it doesn’t hurt it’s really bad. I can’t even imagine how the kids being fed the poison coolaid at Jim Jones compound felt. A child’s worst nightmare is that everyone around them is trying to kill them, even their own parents.

Ok, enough of that. Must calm down and go look at pictures of warm spring days at the beach. Flowers blooming on lush greern hills. Puppies playing with small children. Liberal politicians being dangled over aligator pits.

The swirly bits are just an illustration of the arrow rotating to keep a straight trajectory. I own a Barnett, and the fins on the arrows I use are ever so slightly offset, so the arrow starts to spin when let loose.

I have witnessed survivor guilt from fairly nearby. An elderly neighbor -an utterly sweet man- had been enlisted as a radio-operator and artillery-spotter in Indonesia in the “police actions” 1946 to 48(eufemism for “last a-moral try of reckless politicians to re-enstate colonialism”)

He had been witness to a platoon of young dutch soldiers going bezerk in the wadi’s, killing everything that moved. He was frozen in his place while looking at it, and was only capable of radio-ing in what happened hours afterwards. He did not come out of that one the same. He repeatedly tried to kill himself because he felt that would redeem his inaction.

Yes ,even a country as tiny as The Netherlands has a dark “vietnam-like” bit of history.

In Your case: I believe, when the time is right, You’ll go to the black wall. And it will help, although it will not be painless.

My neighbour went to Indonesia a couple of years before he passed away at 91.(he was quite the fit veteran). He met some of the survivors. They did not blame him. They simply stated :”In war people go crazy, it’s just human nature to go crazy in war” After that, he had found the ease of mind he sought, his wife stated such, and we didn’t hear him scream at night anymore.

I, personally, wish politicians would be sent-out first with a kit, an M-16, 6 magazines, and a flag when they want “their war”. It might prevent them from ever again sending young men@women into dirty wars with a colonial/imperialistic smell.

And one more thing. The article says the figurine “was believed to be a unique work dating from around 550 to 950 A.D.” and the year 550AD was about 1450 years ago. Now, where have we heard that number before?

I dunno, but Brandi’s symptoms kinda make me think of some of the reactions you can get from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The numbness and inability to respond to the injury of her “angel”. And it would also cover her extreme motherly rebound reaction to the abuse and unimaginable pain they endured.
The GGG’s are survivors and are trying to achieve some kinda “normality” in their new states of existance. This re-telling of her trauma may help Brandi and bring her back to “herself”, if my reasoning seems to make sense. I’m a survivor myself and know how much it takes to talk about things and how much it can help. You will go thru hell again getting it out and you can tear yourself back apart, but in the long run it can put you back together and leave you stronger. It’s the knowledge that you DID make it thru somehow and that you ARE strong enuf to make it thru the rest of your life, come hell or high water AND that there is an awful lot of good things to be living for.

I am catching up on the archives, and as soon as I saw that image, that is what I instantly thought of. Scrolling down, at first I couldn’t believe noone had said it, then I remembered … this was originally posted several months before Skyrim came out.

Was thinking to myself, “dear GAWD, for the love of humanity, don’t let me do it … but if noone else posted it, I will *have* to, I won’t be able to resist …”

And Mike got there first! Thank you, for saving me from myself. 😀 All I needed to resist the urge was the knowledge that I would be a copycat if I did it, even if I did think of it before I saw the posts, heh.